Common Ground and Development

Abstract

Language and other forms of communication are inherently ambiguous and therefore require some form of common ground to specify the intended meanings of utterances. Theoretical accounts usually focus on interactions between adults and consider recursive mindreading a prerequisite to establishing common ground. Contrasting these accounts, in this article, we offer a developmental perspective on common ground. We propose that instead of using recursive mindreading, infants rely initially on the expectation that communicative partners act rationally in light of previous interactions, which serves as a starting point for common ground to develop. We describe the changing role of common ground across development. Initially, common ground constrains the meaning of ambiguous communicative acts and facilitates children's acquisition of language. Later in development, common ground makes communication efficient by helping speakers coordinate their actions and intentions, and eventually arrive at recursive mindreading.

Predicting pragmatic cue integration in adults’ and children’s inferences about novel word meanings

“…Thus, semantic ambiguity can be resolved by reasoning about why the speaker produced this particular utterance (H. H. Clark, 1996;Grice, 1991;Sperber & Wilson, 2001;Tomasello, 2008). On the other hand, there is information provided by common ground (the body of knowledge and beliefs shared between interlocutors) (Bohn & Koymen, 2018; E. V. Clark, 2015;H. H. Clark, 1996).…”

Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification

“…Consistent with this, developmental research has shown that the interaction between commonsense psychology and language understanding is at work from early in life. By age two, children are already sensitive to other people's knowledge (Bohn, Zimmerman, Call, & Tomasello, 2018;Southgate, Chevallier, & Csibra, 2010;O'Neill, 1996), past experience (Saylor, Ganea, & Vazquez, 2011;Saylor & Ganea, 2007), visual perspective (Vaish, Demir, & Baldwin, 2011;Koenig & Echols, 2003;Baldwin, 1991), and information in common ground (Liebal, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2010;Akhtar, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 1996;Moll & Tomasello, 2006; see Bohn & Köymen, 2018 for review); although these capacities continue to develop throughout early childhood (Moll, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2011;Nilsen & Graham, 2009;Morisseau, Davies, & Matthews, 2013). These studies show that the building blocks RUNNING HEAD: SOCIAL PRAGMATICS 4 necessary for reference resolution are in place in early childhood.…”

The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language

“…The second psychological construct in our framework is common ground. Common ground refers to bits of information that are assumed to be shared between interlocutors and constitutes the background against which utterances are interpreted (Bohn & Köymen, 2018, H. H. Clark, 1996, E.V. Clark, 2009.…”